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8 Oct 2010 19:44:14

The sound of the ancient Babylonian language has been brought back to life thanks to Cambridge academic, Martin Worthington. His website speechisfire.com hosts some 30 audio files of this extinct language, which include extracts from "The Epic of Gilgamesh," and the "Codex Hammurabi," one of the world's oldest set of laws. Babylonian died out some time in the first century AD and its writing system, Cuneiform, was only deciphered in the 19th century. Martin Worthington's quest to work out what the language actually sounded like has breathed new life into this ancient tongue; in listening to the audio files you are struck, more than anything, by a feeling of familiarity through the similarity in sound of Babylonian to its modern offspring such as Arabic.